Mr. Cushing represents Massachusetts to be a Babel of isms, so many square miles of Bedlam, from Boston Corner to Provincetown.  Is this intended as a depreciation of our free institutions, by showing the results to which they inevitably lead?  Has a Rarey for vicious hobbies been a desideratum so long, and has such a benefactor of his species found his avatar at last in Mr. Cushing?  He tells us, however, that the delusion of Negrophilism, that is, Republicanism, is on the wane, and is destined to speedy extinction.  The very extravagancies he speaks of as so rife and so rampant are to us evidence of the contrary.  They prove the depth to which the religious instincts of the Northern people have been stirred upon the question of Slavery.  Such extravagancies have accompanied every great moral movement of mankind.  The Reformation, the great Puritan Rebellion, the French Revolution, brought them forth in swarms.  A profound historical thinker, Gervinus, remarks, that the political enthusiasm of a nation is slow to warm and swift to cool, but that its moral enthusiasm is quickly stirred and long in subsiding.  Thinking men will ask themselves whether the isms Mr. Cushing enumerates be not the external symptoms of such an enthusiasm,—­and whether it be wise, under the names of “Nationality” and “Conservatism,” to urge aggressions to the point where it becomes the right and the duty of men to consider the terrible necessity of a change in their system of government; whether it be unpatriotic to resist the extension of a system which makes the mass of the population an element of danger and weakness in the body politic, as its advocates admit by their scheme for a foreign protectorate of their proposed independent organization,—­a system which renders public education impossible, exhausts the soil, necessitates sparseness of population, and demoralizes the governing classes.[4]

The ethical aspects of Slavery are not and cannot be the subject of consideration with any party which proposes to act under the Constitution of the United States.  Nor are they called upon to consider its ethnological aspect.  Their concern with it is confined to the domain of politics, and they are not called to the discussion of abstract principles, but of practical measures.  The question, even in its political aspect, is one which goes to the very foundation of our theories and our institutions.  It is simply, —­Shall the course of the Republic be so directed as to subserve the interests of aristocracy or of democracy?  Shall our Territories be occupied by lord and serf, or by intelligent freemen?—­by laborers who are owned, or by men who own themselves?  The Republican Party has no need of appealing to prejudice or passion.  In this case, there is a meaning in the phrase, Manifest Destiny.  America is to be the land of the workers, the country where, of all others, the intelligent brain and skilled hand of the mechanic, and the patient labor of those who